Chicago Cubs president Jed Hoyer spoke about his team's mindset ahead of the MLB's trade deadline Aug. 1. The Cubs are third in the NL Central with  42-48 record.

Via The Athletic's Sahadev Sharma:

“Obviously, we're going to see where we are,” Hoyer said. “The hope, certainly, is that we play well for the next two weeks. I don't want this to be a day-to-day assessment type thing, it's baseball.

“…I'm not going to give you our exact criteria, but obviously we try to make decisions in the most educated fashion possible. Not using emotion and not using one day's loss or one day's win. That's what I think is the most important thing. The simplest thing is we do need to make up ground, we do need to make up ground on .500.”

The Cubs are seven games behind the Milwaukee Brewers and Cincinnati Reds, who are tied for first in the division. Chicago has been up-and-down the last month, posting a 5-10 record since June 24. Before then, the Cubs had won nine of 10 games and were just one game below .500 with a 37-38 record.

Earlier this century, Chicago seemed primed to be a baseball dynasty, but it is yet to do much damage after it broke a century-plus drought without a World Series in 2016. The Cubs won the NL Central Division in 2017 and 2020.

Hoyer was named the Cubs' president of baseball operations in Nov. 2020 after Theo Epstein stepped down from his role. Chicago is yet to have a winning record in its three seasons since Hoyer's promotion.